Leadership Happens. Thinking about Nohria & Khurana’s Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice
Leadership happens. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t go as well as it possibly could.
Editors Nohria Nitin and Rakesh Khurana offer a step toward increasing the viability of positive leadership encounters. They have woven together an excellent text with a solid combination of authors in the Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice: A Harvard Business School Centennial Colloquium exploring how leadership might be done better. The book is divided into five main sections: The Impact of Leadership; The Theory of Leadership; The Variability of Leadership; The Practice of Leadership; The Development of Leaders. Each section offers a wealth of insight from multiple authors hailing from across the academy and business.
In the beginning section the idea of leadership performance and meaning are considered. The editors succinctly query in the first chapter the theme that runs through the entire book, “Do we really understand what it takes to make better leaders?” (3) Their response to the query is that there is some ground yet to cover before they can answer fully in the affirmative. Part of their hesitation comes from recognizing that there is a significant gap in many places between purpose/mission and practice. Thinking/saying and doing are not always commensurate. Overall, the book looks throughout at dualities that leaders are asked to navigate and which are often at odds. That is, aspects are considered such as producing results as opposed to making meaning, thinking and doing as opposed to becoming and being, etc.
Chapter twelve explores a topic that all leaders must both utilize and navigate. Power. Joseph Nye, the long-time Harvard professor of Political Science is the author of this chapter. In relation to leadership, Nye discusses the idea of “soft power” in distinction to “hard power” – a discussion that he has been facilitating for decades in Political Science. Here he also offers the idea that all leaders must learn to navigate differing extents of both hard and soft power and this navigational ability he terms as “smart power.” Nye offers that soft power is the ability to “attract.” This attractional capacity can be manufactured and employed through a number of means, but primarily it is the ability to have people follow-through on tasks due to their desiring to do so rather than having to be coerced into doing so. Nye quotes Eisenhower as saying, “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head, that’s assault not leadership.” (310) As Nye writes just a bit later, “Leadership, like power, is a relationship…” (311) It is from the recognition of the relationality of leadership that Nye begins to think about strategies of power employment and that use of power and which power is used must necessarily vary according to context. From this, Nye suggests that learning to use smart power well develops through increasing contextual intelligence. (327) It is the ability or inability to nimbly appropriate hard and soft power in strategically contextual ways that make them smart power that will spell either the positive or negative futures for politicians, business executives and leaders of all stripes.
Let me finish with a quote from the editors that above and beyond all of the excellent information that is contained in this reader strikes me as exceptionally important. They write, “Finally, the willingness and capacity for individuals to be self-reflective, to be actively engaged in developing themselves as leaders, must also be recognized as crucial to the development of leaders. Indeed, developing this capacity for disciplined and honest self-reflection may be essential to becoming an authentic leader…” (22) I agree. So, go think about this (self-reflect), start being what you have thought about by doing good work in whatever ways that are available to you (as well as imagining new ways), read new books, engage with new people and ideas, then reflect some more on what has transpired. Repeat. There’s more, but these are major steps toward increasing the ability to live into becoming a transformative leader.
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